This excerpt from The Five C's of Cinematography: Motion Picture Filming Techniques by Joseph Mascelli kinda below my mind with how easily it explains good composition.  It really does cut through all those "rules" (which have their place for sure, but I think boil down to this overall theme of simplicity described below).

“The secret of good composition can be explained in one word: simplicity. A complicated or cluttered composition, even though it obeys all rules of good composition, will not be as effective as a simple one. Simplicity does not imply starkness. A simple composition is economical in use of line, form, mass and movement; includes only one center of interest; has unified style which harmoniously integrates camera angles lighting, tonal and color values.

The web is a massive resource for finding information about photography.  How to do this, where to find that, best practices, etc..  but while it is a lucrative source of knowledge it is also a giant dumping ground for crap.  So much of the information out there is wrong, recycled and incomplete, thus tracking down the quality material is more work than your average person wants to deal with.  

Good news for you!  Since it's my job to stay up on the latest trends, skills, blah blah blah…  I have no choice but to plow through this sea of material looking for quality information.   I see no reason why you should have to do this when I've already done it, so I'm creating this page where I will list anything of value I find, as I find it.  Bookmark this page and come back to it whenever you're looking for new tutorial resources to read. 

Fall is an amazing time to photograph landscapes and nature, however, just pointing the camera at the pretty colors is not likely to get you a wall hanging.  Even if it does, it's just a wall hanging like a thousand others.  So what can you do to help spice up the your fall photography?  Here's some ideas which may help inspire a better day of shooting on your next fall photography trip.

A very quick and simple method to add lens flare to any photograph if you want to enhance a light source in the photo.  This works well for adding a little intensity to a concert photograph or giving an eithereal feel like in the photo below.

• create a new layer and fill with black
• use “lens flare” filter (filter>render>lens flare) and add a lens flare.  You have to add the black color (or white or grey) because “lens flare” won’t work on an empty layer.
• next step is to remove all that fill color using a blending mode.  In the case of black, “screen” mode will remove the black from that layer.
• now you can place that flare on top of existing light source within the image (for instance stage lights in a concert, or the sun in a landscape, etc).
• You can resize and relocated the flar by simply moving the layer around.
• If you find yourself seeing “sidebars” caused by the edge of the layer then either erase with a soft brush or use a gradient mask to remove it.

Photoshop of course is an amazing way to do touch up work on portrait photography.  However, all too often the touch up artist takes things too far, either by choice or more often becuase they simply don't know the techniques for doing natural touch up work in Photoshop.  The following article gives you some great touchup techniques for skin, eyes, lips and teeth that result in very realistic natural looking images.  As with anything in Photoshop, there are a hundred variations on these techniques, but to get the basic concept down, just grab a portrait of yourself and follow along with the tutorial steps.